Wednesday, June 06, 2007

"4:30 p.m.: Oprah asks about the novel The Road, “Where did this apocalyptic dream come from?”

McCarthy replies, “Usually you don’t know where a book comes from,” but then explains that he and his eight-year-old son John (to whom the book is dedicated) were staying in a hotel in El Paso. “I went and stood at a window, and I could hear the trains coming through, a very lonesome sound.” He said he had a vision of what the place would be like in fifty years, with an image of fires burning on a hill.

4:38 p.m. Oprah gets into the “you were so poor” litany. “I read that you were so poor that you got put out of a 40 dollar a month hotel in New Orleans…So poor that you didn’t even have toothpaste.” Maybe she should break out the yo’ mama jokes next.

Cormac replies, “I was living in a shack in Tennessee and had run out of toothpaste. And I went down the hill to see if there would be anything in the mail and there was a tube of toothpaste.”

“A free sample?” Oprah asks.

“A free sample,” Cormac confirms. He goes on to remark that his life has been full of things like that, that “just when things are really bleak something happens.” So, could McCarthy be practicing The Rules? I can almost see that question springing to Oprah’s lips."